Week 104

Monday 15 March 2021

• A man came to clean out the hot water tank. I masked my face and ajarred a window; he took off his shoes, which was unexpected but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. (Here is a link to the Wikipedia article about the tradition of removing shoes in the home.) None of these things were spoken about. Afterwards, I enjoyed a consistently warm shower, lovely stuff, only slightly marred by a nagging expectation of another sudden temperature surprise. The pressure still drops every so often, like the imaginary weeing giant “Anglian Water” is taking a breath, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

• 🚲 Wondered why the back bicycle wheel was rubbing against the mudguard. The wheel was a bit wobbly, in a way perhaps it shouldn’t be, but so too was the mudguard. A day or so later, late in the evening, with a strange suddenness, I thought, maybe the axle’s broken. And so it was. It’s not the first I’ve destroyed, which has everything to do with potholes and nothing to do with being or having fat arse. It can go unnoticed, cos it’s not like the wheel falls off – there’s just a growing sense of something not being quite right, which is easily confused for all the other ennui from different sources.

  Well, now the wheel has been replaced, and I might already have collected it back from the local non–private equity owned bike shop if only time were more elastic or I’d not gone outside without a mask.

• For as long as I can remember, I have consciously tried to go out of my way to avoid walking behind lone women in the dark, etc. (I’m not saying I want a medal or anything, although a medal would be nice.) But perhaps the act of crossing the road, slowing down etc is actually more intimidating, because it’s like you’re being more sneaky. I feel like there was a sketch about it, maybe on the radio, maybe John Finnemore or Mitchell and Webb, I don’t know how I would find out.

  The nighttime phone-in king Allan Beswick has just touched on the issue.

• Some work.

  At the start of week, I expended some time trying to make my Github Actions action maybe 30 seconds quicker (not to be sniffed at), and maybe it would be a useful exercise to try to write about it. There’s a step that uploads some stuff to DigitalOcean Spaces (which is like AWS S3, and compatible with most S3 client stuff), for which I was using another action – it’s actions all the way down – called “DigitalOcean Space Sync”, which adds maybe 30 seconds of overhead and feels like an unnecessary extra dependency. It works by installing and running the AWS Boto3 client inside a container, but I also install Boto3 outwith the container, so why not just use that?

  The problem was outside of a container, Boto3 tried to connect to 169.254.169.254:80, which I learn is is the Instance Metadata Service, which is handy when you’re running something on one’s own cloud computing computer (not that one truly owns these things) but not on a GitHub Actions runner. I won’t lead you down the blind alleys I explored to try to get it to ignore the IDMS in favour of the API key and secret I’d supplied. Eventually, I realised I needed to set the AWS_EC2_METADATA_DISABLED environment variable; my final mistake was believing the documentation, which suggests setting it to false, but no of course you set it to true to, you know, disable it. Cool story.

• I have subscribed to a Substack newsletter.